Have you ever felt that sinking feeling of launching an event only to realize competitors already seem to be two steps ahead? Perhaps you've noticed others leveraging cutting-edge tech, and you're worried about falling behind. With technology evolving faster than ever before, event planners face mounting pressure. How can you keep pace? How can you ensure your events are not just relevant today—but indispensable tomorrow?
The pace is relentless. You're expected to innovate, engage, and attract attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors—all while planning logistics and managing day-of challenges. The risk? Becoming obsolete. The cost? Lost attendees, diminished reputation, and shrinking revenue.
But imagine if you could tap into proven strategies and AI-powered tools to genuinely future-proof your events. Good news—today you’ll learn exactly how.
My guest today is Warwick Davies—expert event strategist, renowned speaker, and adviser for event organizer powerhouses. Warwick is known in the industry as "The Event Mechanic!," precisely because he knows exactly which gears to turn and which buttons to push to make events wildly successful and profitable. Through his work, he's helped major brands, conferences, and industry-leading organizations create meaningful, profitable, and impactful events time and again. He is brilliant at pinpointing what's holding events back, leveraging smart strategies, and integrating advanced AI tools to ensure events not only survive the competitive landscape but thrive long-term. If you've ever wondered exactly how AI can position you miles ahead of your competition, Warwick Davies is the expert who can break it all down for you clearly, practically, and powerfully.
The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked Warwick Davies about:
✨AI for Competitive Advantage: Learn simple, actionable ways AI can be integrated to set your events apart from the competition.
✨Balancing AI and Humanity: Discover how to implement AI without sacrificing the authenticity and human connections vital for great events.
✨Event-Ready AI Tools: Identify proven, accessible AI solutions you can start using today to stay ahead of innovation curves.
Learn more about Warwick Davies
- Connect with Warwick Davies on LinkedIn
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
- The Event Mechanic!
- AI Personal Assistant, the AI Work Buddy
- Prompt Engineering Made Easy: The RICCE Framework for AI Content Writing
- Airmeet
- Bear Analytics, Joe Colangelo and Eric Misic
- Revolutionizing Event Management: AI Strategies for Success with vFairs
- AI in the Events Industry: A Comprehensive Guide for Professionals
- AI Primer: A Comprehensive Guide
- AI Training for Businesses
- Explore past episodes of the The AI Hat Podcast podcast
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Future-Proof Events: How AI Ensures Your Events Thrive, Not Just Survive with Warwick Davies
[00:00:00] Warwick Davies: I think the thing that I'm excited about for the future is it's going to allow the event marketers to become event strategists if they take the bull of AI by the horns. In that there is so much, there's so much insight that they, well, first of all, I take my hat off to maybe my AI hat off to event mothers because they have some insights about their events that they're either too afraid to offer or not being allowed to offer that really would change the course and profitability in their events.
And I'm really excited. That the event marketers that start to use the tools, not just to get insights from their own data, as we've mentioned, but also to start to run that marketing plan through an AI system to optimize what they're doing and also start to focus on segments within their database to spend more time with and start to get those types of people that are probably very willing to come to your event if you message 'em the correctly and treat them the right way.
[00:00:57] Mike Allton: Mike's got The Hat, the AI kind. Unlocking power in business, you'll find. Cut through the hype, explore the tech. Every week, new ideas to check.
Allton leads us on a digital quest. AI secrets he'll always invest. Tune in tight, don't miss a beat. Knowledge, groove, keep you on your feet. Listen up! To the AI flow. Business growth, here we go. Cutting edge insights, that's the plan. With The AI Hat you'll understand.
Greetings program. Welcome back to The AI Hat Podcast, where I selfishly used this time to pick the brains of experts at harnessing the power of AI across all areas of business, from streamlining operations and boosting productivity to gaining a competitive edge and driving explosive growth. Oh, and you get to learn, too.
Subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead. Have you ever felt that sinking feeling of launching an event only to realize competitors already seem to be two steps ahead. Perhaps you've noticed others leveraging cutting edge tech and you're worried about falling behind. With technology evolving faster than ever before, event planners, I face mounting pressure. How can you keep pace? How can you ensure your events are not just relevant today, but indispensable tomorrow? The pace is relentless. You're expected to innovate, engage and attract attendees, sponsors and exhibitors, all while planning logistics and managing day of challenges. And the risk? Becoming obsolete. The cost? Lost attendees, diminished reputation, shrinking revenue. But imagine if you could tap into proven strategies and AI powered tools to genuinely future proof your events Well, good news. Today you're learn exactly how. My guest today is Warwick Davies, expert event strategist, renowned speaker and advisor for event organizer powerhouses.
Warwick is known in the industry as the event mechanic, precisely because he knows exactly which gears to turn and which buttons to push to make events wildly successful. And profitable. Through his work, he's helped major brands, conferences, and industry leading organizations create meaningful, profitable, and impactful events time and again.
He's brilliant at pinpointing what's holding events back, leveraging smart strategies, and integrating advanced AI tools to ensure events not only survive the competitive landscape but thrive long term. If you've ever wondered exactly how AI can position you miles ahead of your competition work as the expert who can break it all down for you clearly.
Practically and powerfully. Hey Warwick, welcome to the show.
[00:04:04] Warwick Davies: Thanks, Mike. Pleased to be here. That's quite an intro. I, I. I need you to proceed me in every single business meeting. I'm thanks for that.
[00:04:13] Mike Allton: I'm happy to do so, but like I tell everybody very transparently, Claude writes these intros. Claude is a fantastic job and you're the one who did all the work to earn those accolades.
So I appreciate you coming on the show. This is gonna be a really fun conversation. I am not doing events today like I used to, but. During the pandemic and even before I was hosting major, major virtual events on behalf of Agorapulse, thousands of attendees, and the amount of work was absolutely insane, and I feel for event organizers and platforms today.
So to start off Warwick, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges that today's event organizers face, particularly when it comes to staying ahead of the competition?
[00:04:53] Warwick Davies: Well, great question. Let me just start as a preamble of that. To tell you, I'm not a tech person at all, and I, I think that the, uh, Ai, which of course has been around since the fifties is now coming on online and onstream and affecting business everywhere.
So, it's really not just a set of tools, but it's an ecosystem. So in terms of the events business. I think there are two real challenges happening, the first thing that I would say is that the exhibitors to large trade shows are actually using AI to calculate how valuable their participation in past shows have been, and they're using that to calculate and predict what their future success in trade shows and conferences will be, which means that they're gaining the power of information just from the information they're getting it and taking it out of the hands of the en event organizer.
The second thing that, that the technology shift is, is doing, is it's allowing people with next to no knowledge or expertise in trade shows, being able to launch very successful events, conferences, and trade shows, just in, by using harnessing, first of all, being smart and knowing what to ask the various tools that are available, but also to be able to implement quickly. And say the right things to the right people at the right time, which are allowing new competition from outside the business competition that's never been there before.
And the danger for the existing companies in, in the events business are that they're gonna have competition faster than ever. They've gotta do something about it.
[00:06:31] Mike Allton: Oh yeah, a hundred percent. I know as again, as a, just somebody who wanted to run events, if I could have used AI two, three years ago, or an AI event specific tool to make my job easier, I absolutely would've done that no matter the cost.
'cause it was, just weeks and weeks and weeks of work spanning several different months and that was all that I was able to do and accomplish on behalf of the company. And you offered a couple of really practical specific examples about how businesses, sponsors and partners for events are using AI to analyze data.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how that's actually working? We don't need to get into the details of how to do it specifically, but what exactly are they looking at that's helping them inform their decisions?
[00:07:17] Warwick Davies: The thing about exhibitors in, so there's, there's a trade show or conference for every, every single thing that happens in the business world and even in consumer, wine shows and boat shows and various festivals and so on.
Exhibitors in, in those events really are tightening up their budgets. So they really need to know that they are getting the bang for their buck when they're making these investments. Many of the exhibitors are in industries like financial services or pharmaceuticals, and they really have a good handle on managing their data.
So they're already doing, they're already getting insights out of their data already. Well, what AI tools are allowing them to do is to get to those those things faster. So, whereas something might take a few hours to find out if they're looking for the right things, AI can help them get those things in minutes.
And what they're doing with that is they're literally setting up standings or as you say in England League tables, on which events are more profitable and successful than others, and they can literally make buying decisions based on those calculations. With technology that's available right now. The, and the issue with that, and, and initially as, as the costs of
a building, LLMs is, is pretty high to do something custom like that, the pricing, the prices of, that's going right down. So it's gonna be able, it's gonna be available to, to a lot more companies to be able to do that.
[00:08:36] Mike Allton: Right? Right. We can get local LLMs like meta i for free, Llama, and install those and, and with a little bit of prompting knowledge and a little bit of coding, not even much coding really.
You could probably use a different LLM like Claude or Perplexity to help you with the code. You can build that system for yourselves. What about from the event organizers perspective? Specifically? How are you seeing some of them use AI today?
[00:09:01] Warwick Davies: Well, it's on the, it's on the early stages
[00:09:04] Mike Allton: or not?
[00:09:05] Warwick Davies: Well, it's on the early stages. I, I think what. What event organizers are using for is content production, automated personalization to attendees. They're not doing so much on the workflow side of things, which other industries might be doing. But they're able it's interesting because and it's something you told me about your personal AI personal assistant and some, personas that you can actually write into AI tools that they can actually write a lot of this content using their own voice or the company's branding voice, which they're just starting to learn how to do, which makes the messaging that goes out because the.
The comment has been, well, I can, pump everything through AI and it's gonna sound like my competitors 'cause I haven't put my own personal stamp on it. They're able to do that in their own voice, which I think is starting to it's starting to make a big difference. I.
[00:09:57] Mike Allton: Yeah, that's, that's exactly right.
What I have folks if you're not aware, it's, it's called an AI Work Buddy. You can get to it at theaihat.com slash ai work buddy. I'll put a link in the notes. So for you event organizers listening, you use the AI Work Buddy to set up your own AI assistant that understands you, your role, your business, your goals and challenges for the year, what events you're putting on, what your team.
Makeup is like, and to Warwick's point your voice and your target audience. So you can use this AI assistant to plan event strategy, structure, who you're targeting, A BM practices, your marketing plan, whatever you want to, and you can use it to create the copy, the emails, all that sort of thing. And if you've trained it well, which my process helps you do.
It'll sound just like you. So, Warwick, for some of the event organizers listening who maybe they've kept AI at arms length, they haven't really gotten into AI at all, are there any specific entry points or, or tactics that you'd recommend for them to get started?
[00:10:57] Warwick Davies: Absolutely. So the firewall, if you will, seems to be that, and there are a lot of crosswinds and headwinds in the press about being worried about data protection and unleashing your customer data out into the, a LLMs to train them. So, let's put that aside. So, as I said, I'm not a tech person, but once you know what you're trying to do, you can ask AI how to do that. An example which which I had to do yesterday was someone asked me to do a digital conference session of nine minutes and they asked me yesterday Tuesday to get it to them by Monday. And it's something I've never done before.
So what I did is I actually went through I asked Chat GPT how to do it. They basically said, well, you're nine minutes, so that's five slides or five ideas. And I went to another and I wish I could remember which, which application it was on it, we'll put it in the notes. But they actually built a slide deck that's better than any slide deck I've ever had ever before.
And I do a lot of speaking within two hours with, editing and so on. So, I think, so the answer question I just gave you an example, is you have to have a, a goal. What's your goal? What are you trying to do? Put it into what? Put it into Chat GPT, or Claude or Perplexity, and see what it comes back with.
Frequently people don't try AI because they have no idea where to start. But I think if you start and start testing things, I actually did something else to create a playlist from top of the Pops, which is a, which was a music show in England from the eighties. And I said, put together the perfect 50 50 songs that would appeal to me.
And I put in a couple of. Calculations into the coming things into the prompt. And it came back with me, my, with a perfect playlist and I got to edit it and, and replace things that I didn't like and so on. So I think you've gotta start with a goal in mind and start playing around. And once you start doing that, you can see the quality of the output that comes out based on your prompts.
And once you get really good about the prompts, and I'm sure Mike, you want to talk about how to. How to set up a good prompt. You can really come up with something really valuable and once you figure that out, you can do other things which will help cut down the time you have to work on. Just to give you a comparison for me to, created that slide deck that I did in two hours would've taken me about three weeks that I would given it to someone else, would've gone back and forth for three weeks and then it would have the deck and actually looked at a deck that I did that with a few years ago.
And my deck that I created yesterday. Was about a hundred times better.
[00:13:24] Mike Allton: I love that example. It's something I talk about on almost every single show that we've done on this podcast, is how important it is to have specific use cases that can show us, or we have in mind before we start using Ai 'cause to your point, it, it's not a tool, it's a technology.
It's not like a, it's a tool like Canva. I've said before, we're. If you've never used it, I tell you, oh, it's a tool to create images. Well, now exactly what Canva does without ever having to see it. AI is totally different and I, I loved your example of, thinking through what is it that you need to do, and I'd even start, I higher up and, and ask ourselves what, what are we struggling with right now? What are we spending time on? What are the bottlenecks in the organization? What are some of the repetitive tasks or what are the things that we aren't doing very well, but we know we need to improve on? And, and a great example that ties in perfectly to what you're just talking about, Warwick, is event organizers, either themselves or they have staff that are doing sales to potential sponsors. And that means you have to have pitch decks. You need to have a prospectus or something that tells the other business who you're talking to, who's coming to your event, what does the layout look like? What are the sponsorship options?
You've gotta create that. And if you've not done that or it's not good, that's something absolutely AI can help you with. So I appreciate that example. Terrific. And your, your point about prompting is spot on. At a certain point, if you wanna get great output out of the Ai, you need to learn how to communicate it with it, with it.
That's what we call prompt engineering. That. And there's a framework I teach called RICCE, R-I-C-C-E. I'll put a link in the show notes to an article that'll walk you through folks how to learn the rice framework. It's just like training wheels when you first get started it. It helps you understand how to communicate and then eventually you don't need it anymore.
But I know Warwick, one of the other. Fears that people have about AI is that it's stripping away the humanity, the human connections, particularly when it comes to live events. I imagine folks are somewhat rightly concerned that there's a tension there and it's gonna take away from that. How do you think we can practically balance using AI while still maintaining that human-centered approach?
[00:15:36] Warwick Davies: Well, I think that I technologies have tried to take down the events business for decades. Since the internet was predicted to get rid of face-to-face events. Digital virtual events during covid, we're supposed to be getting rid of face-to-face events. So I, I, face-to-face or events are there to stay because most companies that do any kind of conferences or trade show get their most rich leads that they get all, all year from independent events or association events and some of them do their own corporate events of course, too. So face-to-face is the most powerful way of convincing a buyer to trust you and to listen to you and to, exchange needs with solutions with you. And that's only happening well, we'll say it's only happening the, the most rich way that it's happening is at events.
So, so the way that we should look at AI is that like having a office skills or having Salesforce skills or having Marketo skills the job descriptions of the future, and I haven't actually seen a job description where this is in, you're gonna have to have AI skills. In other words, that it's another, not only is it an ecosystem, but it's a series of tools that you'll need to know how to use to optimize what you do. So, whereas it may very well have an impact on the number of people that are in the business. It may not, because I think with AI tools, it's possible that the revenues and the profits and the number of events could take, go to another level because they're so much better.
Because you've got a trusted consultant in your AI tools to really help you at least streamline and optimize what you're doing. So it's even more compelling for someone to come to your event in the future.
[00:17:30] Mike Allton: I could not agree more. I, I've mentioned on, on several shows now, the World Economic Forum put out a report just recently that said that by 2030, within the next four and a half years, there will be approximately 92 million jobs lost due or displaced due to artificial intelligence and related technologies.
But there will also be 170 million new jobs. Created as a result of Ai. So a net gain of 78 million, but that still means 92 million people are going to have to upskill or reskill. Those are the people who have to be able to indicate, to your point on their resume, that they have familiarity with AI and AI related tools, according to whatever it is that their job role is.
And these are great opportunities, like you said, for event organizers. If they can build in AI into their organization, they can start saving their team time that means they may not need, have to hire as many new people as they continue to grow. Gives them opportunities to do more and think more strategically.
One of the interesting things that I've seen over the past couple years, I used to do, like I said, these massive virtual events. And I used to use really highend virtual event platforms. Airmeet was the one that I used most often. And one of the cool things with Airmeet was that it had networking capabilities built in.
And at the time, you would ask the attendees as soon as they come into the site to register, whether it's the day of or maybe you let 'em do it a couple days before you ask them to put in their name, their title, their business, and you let them. Or encourage them to choose some interests from a dropdown box.
So it's very manual, but they put in their interest and that's what it allows the platform to potentially pair them up with other people who've personally expressed that kind of interest. How is AI helping organizers do that kind of thing today Actually match attendee interests, personalizing, enhancing their event experiences.
Have you seen some examples of that happening today? I.
[00:19:26] Warwick Davies: I think we're in the early stages of that. I, I think that underpinning AI in general is a couple things. I think in general in business, but specifically in the events business, you have to understand the context of what you're doing in your job, whether you're a marketer, an operations person, and what, what it, what it means to the rest of the, the whole of the show, for instance.
The second thing, you have to have a, you have to care about your customers. You and, and it sounds stupid of course. Why wouldn't you care about your customers? Sometimes you work so hard on something that you forget about why you're doing it or what the context or what, who you're doing it for. So I would say assuming that you have those things, which unfortunately is in a given all the time, I think that once you can.
Once part of, part of the the getting data from customers is they have to trust you. They have to trust that you're gonna use whatever they give you for their benefit and not just to try and sell them something. Of course. So I think AI allows you to get closer to that. It allows you to create personas and assuming that you get away from the front of your computer and you go out and actually meet some of the customers in person that it allows you to start to build an archetype that is much, much more real, much more authentic. And at that point, on the, on the making, the matches as far as the exhibitors are concerned, they know they're gonna get, first of all, the bar is higher, that they also need to have a high, high touch sort of approach to their customer base, but they also appreciate that the event organizers actually raising the bar on the level of quality of the people that they're gonna be matched with. So I, I think that's in its early stages, and it really depends on the philosophies of caring about that in the first place for you to do it as like your objective, doing something on AI is you need to be, have an objective, a reason for your question and your prompt. So I, I think that's coming. I think the smart folks. Both inside the industry and outside the industry that are creating the next generation events really will have to understand that to be successful and profitable.
[00:21:28] Mike Allton: I could not agree more. When I was running those virtual events for Agorapulse, I was also teaching people how to do virtual events. 'cause I started doing virtual events in 2018 and 2019. So pre pandemic? Mm-hmm. So once the pandemic came on, a lot of businesses knew I'd been doing this. So they turned to me and say, Hey Mike, how do we do it?
So I was teaching them and one of the things I talked about all the time. Was creating space within your virtual events for magical moments because most people will not remember the things that they learned at a particular event. They'll remember the people they met and the things that happened after that, and they can impact them greatly.
My origin story for Agorapulse centers around a very specific event. And if I tell that story, I share the name of the event and I talk about that. And I encourage people to do that. And to your point, if they know that that's going to happen and they care about their attendees, they can use AI to help them not only create space for magical moments, but actually facilitate and encourage people to meet other like-minded folks who are going to help them with an impact in their career, professional lives or personal lives in some way. Folks we're talking with Warwick Davies about how AI is impacting the event industry, both how organizers and platforms host and ex execute events, but also how businesses leverage events. And I've got several more questions you aren't gonna wanna miss, but first, a quick word from our sponsor.
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So Warwick, a moment ago you were talking to me about how businesses who are thinking about attending events can use AI to analyze their data, whatever data they can find to help them make those kinds of decisions. What about event organizers? What kinds of data-driven decision making can help them determine their event's success, and how is AI helping them there?
[00:24:05] Warwick Davies: Well, again, I think that's on the early stages, and I think you and I have chatted separately and concurred that, some of the strategic stuff that AI can do hasn't happened yet. Because for a number of reasons, one that companies aren't banking yet on AI and they haven't set up the guardrails, if you will, for what is to be put into AI and what can't, and there's a lot of worry about data protection in general and so on. So in general my view of the future is that you could write a marketing plan for an event or you could take an old one and you could, almost as a prompt to document that you say, I want you to optimize.
This and take out the stuff that hasn't worked and add more stuff that did work and do more of that, and then come up with some ideas that we might add based on the data that we have on that. We don't know there are patterns within these huge attendee databases that even if we spent weeks looking at the data, we would never come up with some of the insights that AI in the future will be able to give you as an event organizer to make your event much more both get more people, but get more of the right people so that the exhibitors to to these events are actually happier to attend because they're getting more leads.
[00:25:21] Mike Allton: I often think about the B2B Marketing Expo in London. It's a massive trade show. I went three times over the past few years, they had, I don't know, five to 10,000 attendees.
It takes place in the Excel, which is this massive convention center on the east side. Of London and just dozens and dozens of sponsors and it's, and it's my favorite type of floor map where the sponsors and the stages are all intermixed, right? Mm-hmm. So people are listening to a session and a stage, and they're surrounded by the sponsors.
As soon as they're done, they're turned around and they're facing somebody's brand. And if the sponsors played their cards right, they spoke on a stage next to their booth so that people get that visibility right there. But my point here is playing off of what you just said. The challenge to traditional event organizers is they look at what they did for this event in 2024.
They did X number of marketing campaigns. They spent X amount of dollars, they did sales initiatives. They brought in certain sponsors. They know how much foot traffic they got. They know how much registrations they got. They've got data around that. Mm-hmm. They have the data for who attended which sessions and how many sessions that data's there.
They have data for who went into and talked to and had their badge scanned by every single sponsor. But what they can't do to your point is really dig through that data and understand which marketing and sales initiatives drove the most successful attendees for their sponsors. They can't connect those dots because the data is too big with 5,000 of attendees, who's got the time and the resources to look at all those attendees and try to connect those dots and, and I love your point because that's exactly what AI is really, I
really good at. So that's absolutely something that event organizers need to be looking at today. They need to be talking to you, frankly, to figure out how do we take our aggregated data, not individual stuff, but how do we look at our aggregated data as a start and find out what really worked well last year for the bottom line that's a really good place to start. Are there any specific tools or resources that you've found particularly beneficial that you'd recommend to these kinds of organizers to start looking to how they would implement Ai?
[00:27:44] Warwick Davies: Well, a lot of the event tech vendors are act having, they're all saying they're AI enabled and whether they are or not you'd have to ask them I guess.
But, one of the, think that the event platforms or the event tech marketing, tech platforms that enable you to easily segment, I mean before AI easily segment and get you those kind of insights at some level, um, are where I would start. I bear analytics and they're pretty good guys down there.
Joe Colangelo and Eric Mis ic have, have that tool right now where literally you can, they're looking at how, how to do this with ai, but they've already got a level of sophistication in being able to slice and dice your audiences to get some of those insights. For instance past attendees that are in your database.
Can you segment them and figure out what messaging they're more likely to respond to, to get them to come back as a specific example.
[00:28:40] Mike Allton: Love it. I'll also link to a previous episode we did, I interviewed the CEO and founder of vFairs, a virtual event platform that is outstanding and, and we talked at great length about how AI is impacting that space.
Looking ahead, Warwick, what are some of the emerging AI advancements that you're seeing or trends that the event leaders listening really need to be paying attention to today before they become mainstream?
[00:29:05] Warwick Davies: Well, some of them. As I said, we're going to be living in an AI environment. So if you haven't got any, if you have a basic skillset, and I can tell you I think I mentioned that, building the slides I have the capability of building the slides and taking an opportunity to speak at a digital event that I would've said no to.
But AI allowed me to, number one, build a deck. But also be able to record me giving the presentation and send it to them in short order. So I, the first thing I would say is start, I think you've mentioned this, is to have questions that you have or difficulties you're having doing your job.
Check out Ai, get a basic understanding what you can ask and what kind of output you get, and how to be a bit smarter with a prompting to get specific answers. And start with that. And I would start to come up with insights. I think the thing that I'm excited about for the future is it's going to allow the event marketers to become event strategists if they take the bull of AI by the horns in that there is so much, there's so much insight that they, well, first of all, mark, I, I take my, my hat off to maybe my AI hat off to to event marketers because they have some insights about their events that they're either too afraid to offer or not being allowed to offer that really would change the course and profitability of their events. And I'm really excited that the event marketers that start to use the tools, not just to get insights from their own data, as we've mentioned, but also to start to, run that marketing plan through through an AI system to, to to optimize what they're doing and also start to focus on segments within their database to spend more time with and start and do better for to get, those types of people that are probably more very willing to come to your event if you message 'em the correctly and treat them the right way. So in general, I think we're gonna be able to get better, better quality attendance those that, that take AI challenge, are going to put themselves ahead of their competition. And it's going to allow un unlike some folks that have said, AI's gonna take over the world and start to tell you what to do. I think it's gonna be a, it's the events business being a face-to-face business. I think it's gonna optimize the limited time, if you will.
'cause events are sometimes as short as a few hours it's gonna optimize those times so they become much more valuable when you actually do see see each other face to face. So I'm looking forward to seeing that. I think on the downside, which I know you don't want to talk about as much, is those who don't I embrace AI are going to be the victims of their competitors who do. So I would suggest that, even if it's scary, start to, to, there are many free versions of, of all the the main L LMS available to, to start playing around with it. And like I did with the top 50 lists that I mentioned before start to figure out what it can do and then start to channel some of your objectives and challenges that you have into into these LLMs, into the Chat GPTs and Claudes and, and Perplexities and so on. So that you can see what it can do. You can see how you might, it might be able to help you get to the next level.
[00:32:19] Mike Allton: Yeah, I, I couldn't agree more. Now it's, it's probably safe to say that, that the folks listening to this show at this moment are probably comfortable embracing Ai. But let's assume somebody listening is still very skeptical, they're very hesitant about embracing Ai. What would your advice to them be? Particularly when it comes to trying to make their future events successful?
[00:32:44] Warwick Davies: I. I would say if I can do it, anyone else can do it. Because really I, when I first heard about AI at an industry event, I said, nah, it's gonna be the la we're, we're, it's gonna be the latest buzzword that I'm gonna put my head in the sand and it'll be dis, it'll disappear.
It'll disappear in, in months or, or whatever like other things have done in our business. But once I started to understand what it could do it really opened my world. So I would say number one. It's going to be a friend if you get to know it better. It's kind of like, someone who moves into the house next door to you.
What I like to do is introduce myself right away. And then, in the case of my next door number, I literally invited her my neighbor's daughter to come to my daughter's birthday party was, which was in my backyard. And if I hadn't done that, I probably wouldn't have ever got to know them because they don't hang out outside the house there, you spend a lot of time in the house or outside. So it kind of like an analogy to AI is, try it out. It's not dangerous yet. This is the time, this is the kind of the the shallow pond or the safe harbor, if you will, to be trying it out. And get to see what it, what does, there's a lot of free content. This session right now is free. There's so many free coursework and blog posts and newsletters, and even books. I've got a lot of insights out of doing that. So there's all kinds of content.
Some of it costs money some of it doesn't, but I think you really gotta step into the shallow pond here and, and learn about it and see what it could do for you instead of worrying about what it's going to do to you.
[00:34:15] Mike Allton: That's absolutely right. I actually came from a very similar space having written about and studied social media for a decade.
I had spent that entire 10 years telling businesses do not buy into the hype. Do not jump on the latest and greatest social network that the influences are all hyping up like Clubhouse or before that Vine and so many others. 'cause those would've been waste of time. But AI is different. I've come around, I've realized that.
I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing that specifically from the event industry perspective. You've been terrific. For folks who want your help or they wanna reach out and connect with you, Warwick, where should they go?
[00:34:52] Warwick Davies: That's pretty simple. It's, I'm warwick@theeventmechanic.com. Website is the event mechanic.com.
I have a newsletter, comes out twice a month if you're interested in, in the underpinnings of what makes events successful and how to fix problems and solve challenges, including Ai and what to do with Ai. Please go to that again. It's the event mechanic.com. And you can go to my newsletter page to contact me there.
Also my email address is warwick@theeventmechanic.com.
[00:35:23] Mike Allton: Terrific. Thank you, Warwick. Thank you, all of you for listening. Of course, we'll have all those links in the show notes as usual, but that is all the time we've got for today, friends. Now remember, if this is your first foray into the world of AI business and you're not really keeping up with all the terms and the jargon that we might have dropped in today's episode.
I've got the perfect resource for you in the show notes below the AI Primer designed to get you quickly up to speed on terms tactics in the underlying technology that's powering this AI revolution. Check it out and I'll see you in our next episode. Welcome to the grid.
That's a wrap on another episode of The AI Hat Podcast. I hope you've gained some valuable insights and actionable strategies to boost your business with ai. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. And don't forget to visit the ai hat.com for more resources and to connect with me.
Until next time, keep innovating and remember, the future of business is human and it's powered by ai.
